What if there was a way to get to outer space that didn’t involve a rocket or a space shuttle? Here is one solution that sounds so impossible that it just might work. Imagine if you could hook a giant cable from Earth to space and send a space elevator straight to the top. Impossible you say? Sounds like a crazy sci-fi dream straight out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Not at all, at least not for the students, scientists, and engineers that competed in this year’s Elevator: 2010 Competition is Utah. Teams from around the globe were competing against each other to make a robotic climber that would climb up the long cable of the first space elevator. The wining team from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada powered their robotic climbing elevator with laser beams from the ground.

That sounds pretty cool, but an elevator has to be connected at two ends. On the bottom the super strong cables would be anchored to Earth, but what would they be anchored to at the top end, in outer space? Would you believe a weight that simply floats in space? It’s true. This is a bit tricky, but here is how it will work. The weight would have to be a large object, such as a space station or even an asteroid. The weight would float in space outside of Earth’s orbit. This is the area in space close to Earth, where the planet’s gravity pulls on objects so that they revolve around the plant, for example, communication satellites. The weight would be beyond Earth’s orbit. This means Earth would turn beneath it, keeping the cable of the space elevator pulled tight.